This should not be a movie
Martin Doyle2/12/2009 12:58:00 p.m.
It tells the sobering story of an angry brat called Max who goes on a trip to an island of demented Wild Things, before making his peace with the world again. Although it’s only 10 sentences long, they’re damned good sentences, and no wonder it’s sold 19 million copies in the past 46 years.
Turning a book like this into a 1hr 41min movie is to press-gang it into a misguided journey between art forms. Where the Wild Things Are is in a good space already, surely. It doesn’t need time out in celluloid. To fully experience this cultural icon of the 20th century in all its brave and unruly glory, you only need three things: you, your child and the book. Read it, live it, be satisfied.
Spike Jonze’s movie adaptation Where the Wild Things Are hits New Zealand theatres this week. I’ll keep an open mind until I see it, but I must say that this book has proved its worth, its transformative power, so many times in its native format that nothing more is warranted. In fact, I’d go further and say: it should not be a movie. Why? Because more than anything, the book taps into huge subconscious forces by its use of language. It reaches people because it leaves it up to, provokes, each person’s own imagination to deal with its words and themes. TV and film are dumbers of the imagination. They don’t stimulate, they force-feed.
I suspect the film-makers have a rough-cut called Where the big bucks are. Like Max, they might need to learn that, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. The book itself is empowering because it’s savage and non-PC. Its supreme achievement lies in working through powerful feelings without trying to stifle them.
In New Zealand today, such a film would be billed Ostracised dependent with “issues” of anger-management suffers attack of paranoid frenzy. It would be rated R18 and counsellors would be available in the foyer.
And where did Maurice Sendak get the original ideas for his gross, horrific Wild Things? He has admitted they’re based on his own uncles and aunts who used to visit the family home every week. They freaked him out when he was a child and he used to quietly draw them as a way of coping. (Their feelings about the drawings have never been released.)
So, to help your child to survive the annual invasion of inlaws and outlaws at your place this Christmas, perhaps learn from Sendak: give your little darling a pencil and sketch book and encourage them to depict their own kin, warts and all.
They’ll be the better for it. But, once they have exorcised their Hannibal Lecterish visions onto paper, do not ask to see their work or enquire who it is they have depicted. You don’t want to know.
